Xen 3.2 Released

Version 3.2 of the Xen Open Source virtualization solution is now available. The new release not only adds new features, but comes with many modifications under-the-hood.

Various security modules (XSM) have been added to the new version of Xen as has support for ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) for the host system. Support for sharing PCI devices with the virtual machine is still experimental. Xen relies on integrated hardware virtualization support provided by state-of-art CPUs for this.

At the same time x86 emulation was improved to support previously unsupported boot loaders on paravirtualized systems, says Keir Fraser from the Xen developer team in the Release announcement. Other improvements include VGA emulation and configurable timers for HVM guest systems.

Prebuilt packages for Xen 3.2 are not yet available for downloading, however, they will be posted in the next few days. If you are interested in trying out the latest version right now, you can download the source code via the Mercurial version control system and build Xen from scratch. The Release announcement includes a how-to that describes the build process.

New releases of the two competing Web technologies, Flash and Silverlight, have just become available. While version 10 of the new Flash Player runs on three platforms, the Silverlight implementation, Moonlight, is designed exclusively for Linux systems.